Talk:Trail of Tears

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This article is within the scope of the following WikiProjects:
To-do list for Trail of Tears: edit · history · watch · refresh

For those interested in this subject, several related articles need started:

  • Cherokee Phoenix/The Cherokee Phoenix -- the first American Indian newspaper
  • Samuel Worchester -- Missionary who helped start the newspaper, arrested by Georgia, case went to Supreme Court
  • Elizur Butler -- Doctor/missionary arrested by Georgia, went on the Trail and served in the camps as a doctor, provided the "4,000 deaths" estimates most often quoted.
  • Wilson Lumpkin -- Georgia politician, a driving force behind Cherokee removal [1]

Check the dates of the Reed Gold Rush in Mecklenburg/Cabarrus Co, NC, c. 1803.

Contents

[edit] Image needed

This article would benefit from having the most famous image related to the "Trail of Tears", painted by Robert Lindneux in 1942 and found all over the Internet, such as: [2]. The artist died in 1970 ([3]); I don't know if we can use this image, but it would be nice.--Kevin Myers 04:28, Feb 16, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] "Death March"?

read the article, the people were forced to walk the entire length, many died along the way, death march seems rather appropriate, also considering that they were under military guard the entire time. " forced relocation" removes any reference to thier suffering, which is in itself a pov. Hence, Death March is appropriate. Gabrielsimon 02:14, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

You ask me to read the article. Not a problem, since I wrote most of the current version. BTW, your details are somewhat wrong: most of the emigrants were not under military guard, and many did not walk the entire way. The suffering was immense to be sure, though most deaths occurred from disease before the "march" itself. Just telling the story honestly is the proper way to demonstrate how awful and unjust it was. There's no need for loaded language and facile moral posturing when the facts speak for themselves. --Kevin Myers 02:22, July 29, 2005 (UTC)
Although deaths and suffering did occur, death march refers to the intentional infliction of death which, to my knowledge, was not the purpose. The purpose was to relocate them to the Indian territory. That's why I think forced removal is appropriate. Derktar 02:25, July 29, 2005 (UTC).
I think the purpose of most death marches is a mixture of removing people and of killing them (or at least don't care if they die). The goal for example of the Bataan Death March was not to kill prisoners, but to move them to a camp. A death march is more of a march where people get not enough water or food and people are shot if they get behind. The Baatan Death March suffered, according to the article, 14% casualties (from the article 10000 of 64000), which should be much higher if the purpose of the march was the death of the prisoners. The same goes for death marches at the end of WWII. They mostly had other camps for destinations, but people were denied food and water and where also shot if they got behind. This definiton is much easier to verify than things like purpose and missing destinations. - StephanSchmidt

As far as I can tell the problem with trying to understand the Cherokee's removal is that the whole thing was done half assed so there is not usual story for all of the Cherokees removals.

BTW you don't send people on a long trip with food that will go bad unless you want them to die. Someone(s) wanted the TOT to be a death march.

It went bad in restrospect but did they know it would? As stated before most of the deaths were caused by disease that was uncontrollable. In fact even with the Cherokee leading some of the trips, deaths still occured that were out of the hands of the U.S. gov't. Forced removal states only the fact that the Cherokee were forced to relocate and does not have an NPOV slant. Derktar 00:10, July 30, 2005 (UTC).
To my understanding, the Cherokee in fact conducted the majority of their own removal. The few contingents led by conductors from the US army were often led by Edward Deas, who was actually a sympathizer for the plight of the Cherokee. The huge death rate comes from the period after the 1838, May 23rd deadline. This was when they were rounded into camps and pressed into oversized detachments, often over 700 in size (larger then Little Rock or Memphis at that time). With this many people close together, communicable diseases spread quickly, killing many. Further, these contingents were among the last to move but following the same routes the others had taken. The areas they were going through were often depleted due to the vast numbers that had gone before them. Lastly, these final contingents were traveling during the hottest most grueling time of the year, which killed many. What happened to the Cherokee was definently not right, but much of the death rate actually comes from not cooperating and moving voluntarily over the course of the 2 years alloted for voluntary removal.--Winjammer 23:52, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

USA´s imperialism at the beginning. americans could have realocated themselves to the other indian territory instead of forcing the indians to do it. some gold nuggets arent worth a lot of lives i guess

uh, isnt "death march" a star wars song...thing? that is'n appropriate Im a bell(Don't ask) 23:05, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cherokee language, Unicode problems

I have removed the supposed Unicode version of the Cherokee language version of "Trail of Tears" in the opening paragraph. It looked like this:

{{Unicode|ᎨᏥᎧᎲᏓ ᎠᏁᎬᎢ}}

I tried to turn that text into actual entities in &xXXXX; format, but as far as I can tell, it is corrupted and unusable. For example, that "Ž" turns into hex 17D, which is too large to fit into the lower two nibbles of the 2-byte Unicode representation. I'm not all that well versed in Unicode, though; maybe I'm just not understanding something.

I also removed "getsikahvda anegvi", which as far as I can tell has nothing to do with anything. :) If someone here knows otherwise, please let me know or correct the article; I am curious how that got in there! —HorsePunchKid→龜 00:15, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

By the way, if anyone is able to add the original Cherokee in whatever script it's actually supposed to be in, you can use this to convert it into HTML entities. That will avoid problems where the non-ASCII characters turn into garbage in some of the lamer browsers, as has clearly happend with this article. —HorsePunchKid→龜 00:18, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
That old converter I linked to is dead. Try this improved version. Also, if anyone is interested, you can view the Cherokee script, along with Unicode conversions, here. I would love to see the Cherokee back in the article, but I'm not going to be of much help with that aside from these encoding issues. —HorsePunchKid→龜 00:54, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Amazing Grace

User:Kevin Myers, not unreasonably, removed the following, requesting sources...

The Cherokee were not always able to give their dead a full burial. Instead, the singing of Amazing Grace had to replace any ceremony. Since then, Amazing Grace is often considered the Cherokee National Anthem.

I went looking, and found some online sources [4] [5] [6] [[7] [8] [9], though none validate the notion that it was used in lieu of a full burial ceremony. Since that claim is made both here and in the Cherokee article, it would seem worth getting it right. Anyone have a source? -- Mwanner | Talk 14:43, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

My father always tells that story, and I think its pretty interesting. The song is for sure a Cherokee anthem, and was definitely sung during the trail. The part about it being used instead of a full ceremony might be revisionism, I guess. I'll see if I can find anything.Smmurphy 15:16, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
This article [10] quotes another oral source with a different story about how it became an anthem. It may be that various people have various stories about how the song was used on the trail. I think that even if I find my father's source (if its not just a story he knows), it would be cast into doubt by other peoples stories, with no one story being diffinitive. Smmurphy 15:32, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Definitely interesting. Since Christian missionaries led the fight among whites against Indian Removal, and many accompanied Cherokees during the journey, it certainly seems plausible that even those Cherokees who weren't Christians could have been familiar with the song at the time. However, none of the books listed in "references" of this article mentions "Amazing Grace" as far as I remember. Many web sites tend to freely mix myth, history, and urban legend, so hopefully someone can come up with a scholarly source which discusses the story. Of course, if it's a widely believed story but not historically verifiable, that's interesting as well, and we can still report it as such.
The following components of the story should be verified:
  1. The song was sung on the trail
  2. The song was sung in lieu of a burial ceremony
  3. The song is now a sort of Cherokee anthem
  4. The Trail of Tears had some role in making the song a Cherokee anthem
--Kevin Myers | (complaint dept.) 16:09, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
I talked to my father, and he does not have any sources (except oral, sorry) for the story that amazing grace was sung in lieu of a burial ceremony. However the websites Mwanner quotes, the article I quoted, as well as the books [11] and [12], found via google print, corroberate the connection between the song and the trail, and the song's status as an anthem. I will leave it up to someone else to decide if the material should go back in or if it isn't a major enough part of the story. Smmurphy 13:02, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
Good work. I had never heard of "Google Print" before -- that looks like it could be handy for working on Wikipedia. Thanks for that.
Notice that neither book you found goes so far as to claim that the story is "true": they both use qualifying phrases like "it is said" and "it is believed". That may mean that the story is based on folklore or oral tradition rather than traditionally verifiable history. Which is okay, we can and should include information about notable folklore in articles, we just need to make sure to let readers know when we do so. --Kevin Myers | (complaint dept.) 15:38, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Chuck Norris fact

The Trail of Tears is the subject of a Chuck Norris fact. The fact describes the Trail of Tears as anywhere that Chuck Norris has been. Should this be mentioned? Scott Gall 01:30, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Only when hell freezes over. :-) Kevin (complaints?) 15:47, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] concordance...

why is it that the article states that Nunna daul isunyi is the cherokee language term for the trail, while the cherokee language article is given an entirely different name?-Kızılderili 07:41, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Article needs refocusing

There is a lot of good information in this article but it is heavily unbalanced in regard to the Cherokees. The Cherokee were not the only tribe relocated over the Trail of Tears. Nor were they first. Nor was their's necessarily the harshest journey. Nor did the term come from the Cherokee language. The term, for instance, comes from an Arkansas Gazette article quoting a Choctaw chief's statement about a "trail of tears and death". The statement was repeatedly quoted by other newspapers before becoming a general term for the trials of the other southern tribes as they were removed west.

It is just as important to know the background and history of the travails of the other tribes during their removals. For this reason I'm changing the Oklahoma Project rating to Stub for now and its importance to High. OKtag 19:48, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

For better or worse, the phrase "Trail of Tears" has become overwhelmingly associated with the Cherokee removal. Wikipedia policy is that we must reflect common usage rather than decide what things ought to be called. There's plenty of room to write about the Choctaw removal in the article Indian Removal, which is the article you desire but have apparently overlooked. This article, by the way, is simply a "daughter article" of the main article "Indian Removal." If other removals get written about at length, they can be broken out into daughter articles of their own, entitled, for example, as Chowtaw Trail of Tears or Choctaw removal. At some point, there might be individual articles on the removal of each tribe, with summaries at the main "Indian Removal" article. Therefore, it's best to avoid the misguided and unproductive notion that this article should be refocused, and instead get to work on writing about the other removals in the "Indian Removal" article. —Kevin 13:29, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Semantics of term: Trail of Tears

I have contemporarily interviewed a Cherokee Indian who had descendents on the "Trail of Tears". He was offended by my use of the term as we were disussing Native Americans. He said that his family and Elders told him that the Indians/Cherokees did not cry in the 1830's during the Indian Removal from Georgia: the white soldiers cried when they saw the pain, suffering and death of the Cherokee Indians due to their mistreatment, and that THAT is why it is called the Trail of "TEARS": white men's tears. Some of the older Cherokees stayed behind in Georgia to die on their land, or they married a white person to stay in Georgia. Others went on the "march" knowing they would not survive, giving their blanket to more feebler, older tribal members or babies, etc., There are many graves along the "Trail of Tears" and much lost history of these Peoples. Some of the US Calvary soldiers were kind and sympathetic but they had to follow the system, the same as concentration camp guards did in Nazi Germany. The previously honored and respected Cherokee Tribal Chiefs were given no special privileges or supplies or consideration and several of the Cherokee Chiefs died on the trip and were buried alongside the "trail". The Cherokees that did not assemble were pulled from their homes with babies and children in tow, leaving food cooking on the stove, and corralled into a fort. When some of them returned home quickly to get an item to take, white people had already moved into their home, even though a state lottery was later held to allocate the Cherokee's land to white settlers. The state of Georgia made assessments and valuations and tried to pay the individual Cherokees nominally for property, crops and businesses. I have seen hundreds of books, videos on VCR, reminiscences and other educational material on the Cherokees and this episode in history not listed or available in public libraries, that was collected by culturally aware organizations and individuals. I have traveled to the old home sites in Georgia, visited the sites of the forts and collection points, reviewed unpublished histories in local libraries, and traveled to Oklahoma several times. Further historical research can be done with tribal members' descendants living in Oklahoma, tribal histories/archives, and by attending pow-wows with a Medicine Man. Actual government documents and correspondence from the period are still available at the official Georgia State Archives - refer to 1835 to 1838, the counties involved, Indian Removal Act, Cherokee Indian census, land lottery, Department of Interior, Indian Affairs etc.68.19.50.91 04:39, 25 February 2007 (UTC)ProfEugen

The cherokee tribe was named after their first chief, Cherokee.

[edit] Trail of tears error

Moved from Wikipedia:Help desk#Trail of tears error

I am a choctaw Indian from Oklahoma. Your description of the trail of tears is innacurate. The Cherokee were not the first to walk the trail of tears nor were they the first to use the term "trail of tears as the site implies. The Choctaw were the first tribe to be massivley relocated during removal, a choctaw chief said when asked about his journey "It has been a trail of tears and death" The cherokee were relocated after the Choctaw and are often associated with the trail because that is the tribe that non native people Identify themselves with. Choctaw, Seminol, cherokee, Chickasaw, and Muskogee Creek tribes NOT JUST THE CHEROKEE. Ant site that states that the trail of tears is specifically cherokees first, only or that cherokees Coined the term is inaccurate.

here are some sites: http://www.thebicyclingguitarist.net/studies/trailoftears.htm

http://www.nationaltota.org/

http://www.cts.bia.edu/trail_of_tears/index.htm

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~mboucher/mikebouchweb/choctaw/trtears.htm —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.4.216.115 (talk) 16:40, June 21, 2007

This article sometimes displays incorrect information because it is frequently vandalized or naively edited. A previous version of the article mentioned that that the phrase originated with the Choctaw removal; it's fixed now, though who knows for how long. Wikipedia still needs an article specifically on Choctaw removal or the Choctaw Trail of Tears, but no one has yet been interested enough or knowledgeable enough to write it. —Kevin Myers 13:17, 4 September 2007 (UTC)


Another more superficial but factual error is the identification of the first American Gold Rush as being in Georga in 1820s--the Reed gold discovery/rush in North Carolina predates it by 25 years. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.222.186.95 (talk) 00:07, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

There should be a general trail of tears article and a specific trail of tears article ... This article should be renamed to the Cherokee trail of tears since thats its main focus ... a Choctaw trail of tears can be developed along with other tribes. Rob (talk) 16:23, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I'll begin the process of intergrating information about other tribes. And creating sub-articles since there have been no reponse.Rob (talk) 18:42, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
Choctaw Trail of Tears article created, moved content from Trail of Tears to Cherokee trail of tears. Rob (talk) 19:30, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
I have completed the major section of the Trail of Tears article that accurately includes many of the tribes removed. Some section were cut and pasted and then narrowed down ... other section like the Chickasaw removal is still a work in progress. Rob (talk) 16:48, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Concerning the number of Choctaw deaths. This article in the Chronicles of Oklahoma for Spring 1970 has a higer number: "The Reverend Cyrus Byington, who was a missionary among the Choctaws before removal and who traveled with them, estimated that at the time of removal there were 40,000 Choctaws, of whom 6,000 died during migration." Odestiny (talk) 15:05, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
Just as Byington says it is an estimation, no one is sure of the number of deaths. As I do prefer a range of values as opposed to a single value ... I'll incorporate it into the article.